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Nate Cohn: Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020

Anyone finding humor in the prospect of Trump’s possible re-election is an idiot.
 
There's only one socialist running in 2020 and it's Bernie.

If you disagree with Warren's policies on the basis that you believe it puts too much of an fiscal burden on the upper class or that you believe it errs on the side of too much government regulation on the free market then say so but don't label her as a socialist. She's literally not a socialist - she's a capitalist who believes that the government should be more involved than they currently are.

"Socialist" as an epithet has followed the same route that "political correctness" has from the right to the point where it doesn't mean anything when used anymore beyond signaling that you disagree with the person's views.
 
I am moving to Florida next summer to try an do my part for the electoral college tally.
 
New Poll Shows Democratic Candidates Have Been Living in a Fantasy World
By Jonathan Chait

Normally, it is a mistake to overreact to the findings of a single poll. In general, an outlier result should only marginally nudge our preexisting understanding of where public opinion stands. This case is different. To see why, you need to understand two interrelated flaws in the 2016 polling. First, they tended to under-sample white voters without college degrees. And this made them especially vulnerable to polling misses in a handful of states with disproportionately large numbers of white non-college voters. The Times found several months ago that Trump might well win 270 Electoral College votes even in the face of a larger national vote defeat than he suffered in 2016.

All this is to say that, if you’ve been relying on national polls for your picture of the race, you’re probably living in la-la land. However broadly unpopular Trump may be, at the moment he is right on the cusp of victory.

What about the fact Democrats crushed Trump’s party in the midterms? The new Times polling finds many of those voters are swinging back. Almost two-thirds of the people who supported Trump in 2016, and then a Democrat in the 2018 midterms, plan to vote for Trump again in 2020.

And the Democratic presidential primary has been a disaster on this front. The debate has taken shape within a world formed by Twitter, in which the country is poised to leap into a new cultural and economic revolution, and even large chunks of the Democratic Party’s elected officials and voting base have fallen behind the times. As my colleague Ed Kilgore argues, the party’s left-wing intelligentsia have treated any appeals to voters in the center as a sign of being behind the times.
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http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019...scription List - Daily Intelligencer (1 Year)
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That’s a pretty dumb article. Of course the swing states are close. They’re swing states. And perhaps more importantly, Democrats aren’t even campaigning there. They’re worried about Iowa. So Trump is campaigning against nobody in swing states and he’s barely holding on.

Name recognition is the name of the game. I’d love to see a poll asking people if they follow the news more or less than they did four years ago and compare by party. So many people I know have checked out and don’t follow the daily issues and could tell you very little about the primary. It’s playing to Twitter and Iowa because that’s who is showing up. People who voted for Trump in 2016 were campaigned to in 2018 and some voted for Dems. They’ll be campaigned to again and may choose a Dem.

And of course this does make two important points about polling. He started off with a standard critique about polls then talked about how hard it was for some moderate candidates to gain traction. He didn’t connect the dots to discuss how polls played a role. Did the approved DNC polls undersample less educated white people? We don’t know but he could have made the argument.

Second, will polling account for any increased excitement among Dems? Voter suppression? Weather? Whatever fake or exaggerated issue Republicans focus on in the last week of October 2020? Any number of factors impact turnout.

It was a poorly written piece that did exactly what he warned against, hyperventilating about one poll.
 
PhDeac said:
That’s a pretty dumb article. Of course the swing states are close. They’re swing states. And perhaps more importantly, Democrats aren’t even campaigning there. They’re worried about Iowa. So Trump is campaigning against nobody in swing states and he’s barely holding on.

Name recognition is the name of the game. I’d love to see a poll asking people if they follow the news more or less than they did four years ago and compare by party. So many people I know have checked out and don’t follow the daily issues and could tell you very little about the primary. It’s playing to Twitter and Iowa because that’s who is showing up. People who voted for Trump in 2016 were campaigned to in 2018 and some voted for Dems. They’ll be campaigned to again and may choose a Dem.

And of course this does make two important points about polling. He started off with a standard critique about polls then talked about how hard it was for some moderate candidates to gain traction. He didn’t connect the dots to discuss how polls played a role. Did the approved DNC polls undersample less educated white people? We don’t know but he could have made the argument.

Second, will polling account for any increased excitement among Dems? Voter suppression? Weather? Whatever fake or exaggerated issue Republicans focus on in the last week of October 2020? Any number of factors impact turnout.

It was a poorly written piece that did exactly what he warned against, hyperventilating about one poll.
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I get the impression that the person who wrote this article is a centrist Democrat, and like nearly all centrists, he's long been convinced that progressive Democrats simply can't win the presidency. So he took this one poll and used it as proof that he's right. At least progressives stand for something. It's hard to see exactly what centrists stand for - where are they on healthcare, tax cuts, closing the wealth gap and all the rest? A classic Dem centrist, Rahm Emmanuel, is now a roundtable regular on ABC's This Week on Sundays, and he actually agrees with Chris Christie a good deal of the time on things like universal healthcare ("can't do it"), but he never seems to have any ideas of his own about any national problems. Being in the middle doesn't help if you don't have any ideas or solutions yourself. Sometimes it feels as if they're just running as Republican Lite - "we're nearly as conservative as Republicans on economic issues, but not as crazy on social and cultural ones!", which is not exactly an inspiring battle cry.
 
Rahm and other "centrists" have had their center pulled to the right for decades. They try to occupy that space as if Republicans will meet them there for some grand compromise.
 
Good posts. Obama beat the ultimate centrist in the primary and was branded far too liberal by Republicans yet he won big with huge coattails.
 
PhDeac said:
That’s a pretty dumb article. Of course the swing states are close. They’re swing states. And perhaps more importantly, Democrats aren’t even campaigning there. They’re worried about Iowa. So Trump is campaigning against nobody in swing states and he’s barely holding on.

Name recognition is the name of the game. I’d love to see a poll asking people if they follow the news more or less than they did four years ago and compare by party. So many people I know have checked out and don’t follow the daily issues and could tell you very little about the primary. It’s playing to Twitter and Iowa because that’s who is showing up. People who voted for Trump in 2016 were campaigned to in 2018 and some voted for Dems. They’ll be campaigned to again and may choose a Dem.

And of course this does make two important points about polling. He started off with a standard critique about polls then talked about how hard it was for some moderate candidates to gain traction. He didn’t connect the dots to discuss how polls played a role. Did the approved DNC polls undersample less educated white people? We don’t know but he could have made the argument.

Second, will polling account for any increased excitement among Dems? Voter suppression? Weather? Whatever fake or exaggerated issue Republicans focus on in the last week of October 2020? Any number of factors impact turnout.

It was a poorly written piece that did exactly what he warned against, hyperventilating about one poll.
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How is a telephone poll supposed to account for voter suppresssion, the weather 12 monts from now, or positive "get out the vote" efforts ? Or are you suggesting that polling is worthless anyway ?
 
BiffTannen said:
How is a telephone poll supposed to account for voter suppresssion, the weather 12 monts from now, or positive "get out the vote" efforts ? Or are you suggesting that polling is worthless anyway ?
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I’m saying a critique of polls based on one turnout factor should include them all.

And yes, polls can adjust the weights to estimate different factors based on historical trends. It’s not worth doing that until mid October.
 
so this is one of those times when we're supposed to believe and fear polling information
 
Jacobin is talking about how unrealistic this is. Krugman leads with how this would never get passed. Its a govt take over bigger than the current budget. Its filled with unrealistic assumptions, and contains many 401k and economy killing taxes. I see it playing well in swing states at election time.
 
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ChrisL68 said:
Jacobin is talking about how unrealistic this is. Krugman leads with how this would never get passed. Its a govt take over bigger than the current budget. Its filled with unrealistic assumptions, and contains many 401k and economy killing taxes. I see it playing well in swing states at election time.
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I don't think there's any doubt that Republicans will savage Medicare-for-All if any Dem who supports it wins the nomination (they'll probably tar any Democratic nominee who doesn't support it anyway), and it probably won't play well in swing states, as the GOP will define it negatively before the Democrats can get their crap together and respond (which seems to be the political pattern for years now.) Having said that, healthcare as a whole is a big winner for Democrats, including in those swing states. It was a big reason why the Dems took control of the House in last year's elections. I haven't heard many centrists say anything specific about what they would do to fix our healthcare system, other than some vague comments about "expanding Obamacare", whatever that means. If Medicare-for-All is a bad idea, then centrists need to come up with an appealing alternative.
 
BiffTannen said:
How is a telephone poll supposed to account for voter suppresssion, the weather 12 monts from now, or positive "get out the vote" efforts ? Or are you suggesting that polling is worthless anyway ?
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You are highlighting the difference between polling/data analysis that news agencies and polling companies do and predictive modeling that folks like Nate silver do. A predictive model needs to take the results of data analysis and add stochasticity to apply variability and uncertainties about future conditions. Predictions are and should be much more uncertain than current condition assessments.
 
Like highland said, Dems could be in trouble is M4A is the centerpiece of their platform. The RNC and SuperPACs will spend at least $1.5-2B on attacking it.

Highland, we can get to M4A without scaring anyone. If a true public option is offered to the public and businesses, it will effectively morph into M4A without the drama. the public option will be greatly cheaper and the supplemental coverage that is available to seniors to get one to $0 deductible and $0 copay will still create massive savings over private insurance without giving the GOP an easy target.

After a few years, private insurance will be relegated to providing those supplemental and RX coverage like they do very affordably for Medicare.

Add on top of that RX coverage and lowering RX prices and the Dems can win.

Do you care what getting to universal coverage is called or do you simply have to have purity in the name of it?
 
ChrisL68 said:
Jacobin is talking about how unrealistic this is. Krugman leads with how this would never get passed. Its a govt take over bigger than the current budget. Its filled with unrealistic assumptions, and contains many 401k and economy killing taxes. I see it playing well in swing states at election time.
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I think there is a little bit of self fulfillment here. It may end up that it doesn't play well in swing states, but at least part of that will be the breathless coverage about how unrealistic it supposedly is. Economy killing!
 
Highland Deac said:
I don't think there's any doubt that Republicans will savage Medicare-for-All if any Dem who supports it wins the nomination (they'll probably tar any Democratic nominee who doesn't support it anyway), and it probably won't play well in swing states, as the GOP will define it negatively before the Democrats can get their crap together and respond (which seems to be the political pattern for years now.) Having said that, healthcare as a whole is a big winner for Democrats, including in those swing states. It was a big reason why the Dems took control of the House in last year's elections. I haven't heard many centrists say anything specific about what they would do to fix our healthcare system, other than some vague comments about "expanding Obamacare", whatever that means. If Medicare-for-All is a bad idea, then centrists need to come up with an appealing alternative.
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https://peteforamerica.com/policies/health-care/
 
tiltdeac said:
I think there is a little bit of self fulfillment here. It may end up that it doesn't play well in swing states, but at least part of that will be the breathless coverage about how unrealistic it supposedly is. Economy killing!
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I think Warren gets pretty favorable press coverage.

It's a bigger government program than the entire federal budget, and that is using some VERY FAVORABLE assumptions.

It wipes out the Trump tax cuts and adds significantly more corporate taxes on top of that. Taxing foreign earnings currently at 35% would make US multis very noncompetitive around the world.

It expands on the wealth tax, raises a variety of passive income rates.

It is very unfair to companies that currently offer good health benefits as it forces them to keep paying in while taking away that competitive advantage in hiring while not making companies that offered poor benefits pay in the same amount.

The second I read it I thought wow this is a disaster. Didn't take any breathless coverage.
 
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